Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, during the 1990s, and the overwhelming entry of economic migrants from East, North and South, our country saw a rapid increase in crime. The state tried to confront it with meager means and with police officers lacking training, equipment and humanity, referring to the majority and not to the exceptions.

Thus, instead of a decrease, an even greater increase was observed in crime, in the so-called violent crimes, robberies, burglaries, drug trafficking, homicides and human trafficking.

The State, that is, the inadequate named officials, because it did not have financial resources to strengthen its arsenal by training police officers and equipping them with the necessary means, found another method of combating crime: the mass production of laws written “on the fly”, providing draconian penalties against those found guilty of committing offenses.

On the basis of these laws, those found guilty are not the real criminals, but the weak, those who commit insignificant violations, drug addicts, “illegal migrants” and the destitute, Greeks and foreigners, who are forced mainly by the need to survive or because of their dependence on drugs to violate the strict laws. Thus, those who commit insignificant offenses, on the basis of the strict and inhuman criminal legislation in force, are characterized as particularly dangerous criminals and are crushed by excessive, merciless and unjust penalties ranging from ten years to life imprisonment.

Among the severe penalties in force in our country, which constitute the adoption of foreign models in their worst version, are the penalties imposed on those characterized, as a rule unjustly, as drug dealers [Nomika Epilekta: “Drug addicts, the laws and their amendments”]. On them the penalty of life imprisonment is imposed “mandatorily”, given the courts’ refusal to recognize “mitigating circumstances” , such as prior honest life, the young age of the offender and his illnesses, on the basis of which this primitive penalty is significantly reduced, regardless of whether the convicted persons are young, 18, 20 or 25 years old, whether they are truly drug addicts, whether they suffer from mental illnesses or whether they come from troubled, usually broken, families. The penalty is one: life imprisonment and the burial of the convicted person in modern infernos - graves, which the clever legislator, during a period when he was not occupied with granting privileges to the ruling classes and to the people of the governing faction, renamed “detention establishments”, abolishing the unpleasant word “prisons” . Something similar happened with the so-called pre-trial imprisonment, that is, the imprisonment of a citizen without a conviction, but solely on the basis of criminal prosecution against him, which may be unfounded, unjustified or erroneous. Pre-trial imprisonment has already been renamed “temporary detention”, so as not to shock.

In order to make safer the conviction of unfortunate minor offenders with the harshest and most crushing penalties, the police, and then the prosecutors, characterize them as members of “criminal organizations”. Thus, by this characterization alone, they have secured a first penalty ranging from five to ten years. And if the unfortunate defendant is characterized as the leader of the supposedly criminal organization, his penalty reaches up to twenty years, because of that characterization alone, which as a rule is made arbitrarily.

For example: if three young people are arrested on the accusation that they broke into some shop, their action is immediately characterized as action within the framework of a “criminal organization”, and their conviction, both for their participation in this essentially nonexistent organization and for the burglary, is absolutely secured by the imposition of crushing penalties, over five years for each one and, in the best cases, seven to twelve years. These are penalties that do not reform, but destroy; instead of socializing the convicted person, they corrupt him, turning him into a true and unrepentant criminal, full of hatred and a desire for revenge.

According to the law (article 187 of the Penal Code), for a criminal organization to exist, at least three persons must cooperate, having jointly decided to commit specific offenses; their action must have duration and their relations with each other must be close, and there must be “structure”. In other words, three criteria must be met or three conditions must exist: numerical, qualitative and temporal.

On the basis of this law, criminal organizations acting in our country have multiplied, not in reality but formally. Dozens of supposed criminal organizations are dismantled each year, and thousands are tried as members of criminal organizations which, many times, are judged by the courts to be nonexistent, with acquittal from the charge that the defendants formed a criminal organization.

The reasons why criminal prosecutions are brought including the charge of “participation in a criminal organization” or “formation of a criminal organization” are specific.

The main reason is the ease with which the fundamental rights of the citizen are violated when he is accused of such a charge (because respect for fundamental rights places barriers before state arbitrariness). He may be arrested at any time, because his crime is considered continuous and therefore always in flagrante delicto. The police have the possibility, by exception, to monitor and intercept, that is to record, his telephone conversations (and to videotape the movements of the suspect), which are considered inviolable and whose secrecy is protected under article 19 of the Constitution.

Also, those conducting preliminary investigation or investigation may freeze, without any limitation, the assets of the accused, violate bank secrecy and freeze bank accounts, seize cars, ships or other valuable objects and, in general, may strike decisively at the person being prosecuted, even at his household members and relatives. Usually, he is not in a position to resist, either because he lacks means of defense or because, due to the surprise deliberately imposed on him by the state prosecuting mechanism, he submits to the forces of repression and is trapped by the improper methods of his persecutors.

The prosecutions of citizens under the pretext of combating criminal organizations have become fashionable. Every suspicious action, without being solved, is baptized as a “criminal organization”, with tragic consequences for constitutional rights, individual freedoms and the institutions of the Rule of Law, which tends to be transformed, if it has not already been transformed, into a State of Injustice.